I recently received over a pound of cowrie shells and have been clamoring for easy projects to use them. This turned out to be perfect. The knots in each ring of the tee strands need to be camouflaged! Here's what you'll need to do what I did.
You'll need, a tee shirt, a latch hook or crochet hook, straight edge, cutting blade (or scissors), and thread.
1. Find a tee shirt! Using a straight edge and a rotary cutting blade, cut strips about 1" wide. I folded this tee in half, but it's not necessary.
2. Stretch the strips, using your hands and /or feet. Pull, pull pull! Take one of the long stretched out ovals and cut it to make a strip. Wrap this strip around a section of all of your stretched out bands. Coil tightly then tie off the loose ends.
3. You will have 2 loose strings handing down, loop each through an open end of a cowrie shell and double knot it. Then cut off the excess.
4. To camouflage the knots along your necklace:
- Guide your latch hoot through the top (small) hole of a cowrie shell
- once it's through, grab a fabric strand just, above a knot.
- Close the latch and pull the fabric back through the shell.
- Disengage the latch hook and keep the fabric loop loose. Cut a piece of thread (7"-8" long) and tie it through the loop and around the knot in youu fabric.
- Knot it 3 or 4 times then cut off the excess thread. Repeat until all knots are camouflaged.
